It was a tight squeak but our team, The Bearded M&Ms*, held on for victory in last night’s final round of The Front Door‘s Monster Pub Quiz. At the end, victory (both on the night and overall) was ours but only just.

This was the third night of three in the Front Door and, as we sat down at our table, we knew we had a four point lead over our nearest challengers for the big prize. By half-time things weren’t looking so rosy as, in rounds 2 and 3, we’d put in our worst performance in two consecutive rounds for a long, long time.

Our mood wasn’t helped by an surprise visit to our table by the quizmaster, who told us to watch out for any secreted mobile phones in the room. “Someone just got 9 right in round 3”, he told us.

As we’d found round 3 so hard (will explain below) that we’d felt lucky to score 5 in it ourselves, we could see what he was getting at. There was googling afoot…

The potential of a hard frost had to be braved last night for the second of The Front Door‘s three-part quiz. Sure, the weather forecast said it was going to be 6°C, with a good chance of showers but still, you can never be sure.

Liverpool v West Ham was also scheduled to be shown in the back part of the bar and, with 75% of the team inflicted with support of the reds, there was a worry that this might prove distracting. Thankfully, the cold weather played havoc with the Setanta signal. The picture seemed to be completely garbled almost every time one of us snuck out to check the game. Dave couldn’t handle being too out of the loop though and managed to divide his cerebral hemispheres between the first four rounds of the quiz and the Five Live match commentary in his right ear!